ONE. NAIROBI AND BEFORE

The last stage of the long march to Beijing began in Nairobi, at the conclusion of the third world conference on women in July 1985. The Nairobi Conference, whose full title was the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace had been called to conclude the Decade. It would decide on next steps in the international movement for advancement of women.

It took place at the end of the Cold War, during a period when the North-South struggle over a New International Economic Order was just concluding and when the United Nations was going through one of its periodic financial crises. The Conference succeeded in adopting by consensus a final document, the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women to the Year 2000.

Adopting the document by consensus was probably the greatest political triumph of the Conference, since during other United Nations conferences of the 1980’s and at the two previous women’s conferences starting in 1975 no final document had been agreed by all participants. But the document itself was flawed, at least to any external observer.

Alternately general and overly precise, the Strategies were a mix of muddled consensus language and the kind of bureaucratic "UN-ese" for which the Organization is notorious. A paragraph stating in high rhetoric that

is followed by a paragraph noting that

In a text totaling some 375 paragraphs, the Strategies touched on many of the central issues affecting women: employment, human rights, education. It skirted many others: violence against women, political participation, the media. And it was generally vague about who was responsible.

Looking at the text today, I am struck by its use of the passive voice. Exhortations are of the form "X should be done to enable women to do Y." There is an implicit idea that X should be done by the Government, since the Strategies were adopted by governments. Since most Governments were (and are) firmly run by men, the Strategies are, in one sense, a quaint Victorian plea for the men to do the right thing by their women.

The Strategies could be seen by those men as a kind of sop to women activists: "You see, we’ve given you your year and your decade, now let’s move on the important issues." To women activists, the Strategies were just a starting point.

In another sense, however, the Nairobi Conference and its Strategies, was the culmination of a much longer process that started with the founding of the United Nations and continued for forty years. The analogy with the Israelites forty years in the desert as Moses led them to the promised land is appealing, but the difference was critical: there was no Moses, even though there was an image of the promised land.

To see the departure point for the long march to Beijing, it is best to start by looking at the first forty years. Many of the issues that were resolved at Beijing first appeared at earlier stages, metamorphosed and reappeared. The institutions involved evolved, changed and remained the same.

A. Women and the United Nations: starting the march

The signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 set a basis for the organization that has endured for fifty years. A response to the depredations of World War II, it was both a normative expression of what a peaceful world should look like and an organizational outline of institutions that were expected to achieve it. It was also the first internationally-agreed document that advocated equal rights for women, even though very few women were among its signers.

The Preamble to the Charter begins:

In its first article, entitled Purposes of the United Nations, the Charter states that its third purpose is:

And in its Article 8, the Charter states clearly:

No previous international agreement had expressed equality between the sexes. Not the Covenant of the League of Nations, not any of the precursor documents issued during World War II. The ambition of the signers of the Charter, of whom only four were women, could be seen in the fact that of the States signing in San Francisco only about half gave women the unrestricted right to vote and hold public office. Only a few found it necessary to include women on their delegations.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s letter

The inclusion of equality language in the Charter was at least partly the result of strong lobbying by the few women present in the negotiations, almost none of whom were from the United States. It was also at least partly in recognition of the fact that during the war, women had broken stereotypes and moved into the types of jobs, in industry and in government, that had been previously denied to them. While World War II was, in its combat phase, a classic man’s war, for the first time at the home front it was a woman’s war.

This recognition, on the part of the male establishment, that they owed the women something was expressed in "An Open Letter to the women of the world from the women delegates and advisers at the first Assembly of the United Nations". The letter was read by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady of the United States.

In old newsreels, it is still possible to see Mrs. Roosevelt walk to the podium in the hall in [London/Lake Success] where the first Assembly was meeting. She addresses an audience in which there are a few women, but mostly men and mostly old and distinguished at that. Mrs. Roosevelt herself wears a hat and a dress appropriate to her age and station.

In her high, patrician American voice she begins by expressing a concept of solidarity between women and men in addressing international problems. She reads,

She continues, accepting in her text a subservient role for women, whose participation in the United Nations would be allowed rather than insisted upon — a position reflecting the extremely small participation of women in delegations (seventeen out of several hundreds). She says, "In view of the variety of tasks which women performed so notably and valiantly during the war, we are gratified that seventeen women representatives and advisers, representatives of eleven Member States, are taking part at the beginning of this new phase of international effort. We hope their participation in the work of the United Nations Organization may grow and may increase in insight and in skill. "

She reads on, "To this end we call on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more active part in national and international affairs, and on women who are conscious of their opportunities to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance."

She continues by affirming a belief that women were not homogeneous and, in fact, did not have the same interests in all parts of the world, and that there were some parts where women's participation was underdeveloped. She states that "We recognize that women in various parts of the world are at different stages of participation in the life of their community, that some of them are prevented by law from assuming full rights of citizenship, and that they therefore may see their immediate problems somewhat differently."

Finally, she reads that part of the letter that calls upon women to use the United Nations as an instrument to improve their situation, but in so doing it reflected on women’s stereotyped roles as mothers and wives, with participation based on level of qualification rather than right:

The reading of the letter was followed by a general debate, a United Nations practice in which various statements are read into the record. Speakers from the Dominican Republic, Norway, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Uruguay and the United Kingdom. The first three were women delegates, a gentlemanly "ladies first" approach. All supported the ideas presented by Mrs. Roosevelt. If the debate is examined, it can be found to contain many of the contradictory themes that recur over the years: stereotyping of women as mothers, a gentlemanly avoidance of the issues, the premise that without women’s participation the United Nations would not succeed. It also introduces many of the actors who would play a part: government delegations, intergovernmental bodies, the Secretariat of the United Nations and the non-governmental organizations.

At the end of the debate, the President of the General Assembly provided what might be termed a gentlemanly brush-off to what had been a very lady-like request for attention. Speaking in French, he states: "The general discussion is closed. There is no formal proposal to submit to the vote, but I think I can safely tell Mrs. Roosevelt and those who supported her intervention, that the manner in which it was received by the General Assembly leads us to hope that it will be taken into very serious consideration."

In the general debate, the Norwegian representative, the Netherlands delegate and the representative of the United Kingdom presented themes that were to recur over the succeeding decades.

The Norwegian delegate, Mrs. Dalen, expressed the belief that, without the full participation of women, the United Nations could not succeed in achieving its objectives.

""During the war, women in all countries participated and worked in the armed forces, in factories and in the resistance movement in a way never before thought of" she began. "During the war, women's experience, insight and strength were highly appreciated and welcomed. When the nation was in danger the women were called upon and they came, did their jobs, sacrificed and suffered."

"Now, when the war is over and the United Nations are trying to build a new world, trying to lay the foundations of peace and freedom for humanity, " she continued, "the world cannot afford to do so without using the rich resources that women's experience and capacity for work, women's insight and equipment mean for the various nations of the world."

"All human beings have to cooperate in dignity and unity and fidelity. Then we shall succeed in building up a happy, peaceful and harmonious world."

The Netherlands delegate, Mrs. Vervey, spoke what was clearly the fact. Most men did not see any importance to women’s participation in the United Nations. She deflated the arguments against full participation based on biology, social norms and status and psychology in terms that could serve today. And she affirmed that conditions could quickly change. Mrs. Vervey was eloquent:

"... I should like to add that I have missed something, and that is an opposing voice to this motion," she stated. "No one has so far said that he does not want the women of his country to speak and to act here. I am afraid that they have abstained, not because they agree with the purpose of this motion, but because they think that it does not concern them. They might be of the opinion that women in their countries are just faithful wives and mothers, that they do not want to be members of delegations, that they are not qualified for it and take no interest in it."

"To them I want to say a few words," she continued. "There is no one in this General Assembly who supposes that a recommendation like this would result in a future Assembly with as many women as there are men. There are very strong reasons why, in public life, women will always be in a minority. There are biological, sociological and psychological reasons; biological reasons because, after all, the first essential woman's right is the right to be a mother, and also the opportunity to enjoy that right to the full."

"This means that we would never agree to a world in which social conditions resulted in a situation in which married women should be permanently obliged to work in the factories and on the farms and to neglect their families," Mrs. Vervey emphasized, recalling women’s traditional roles. "but this does not mean that we should for ever compel all women to confine themselves to the home."

"There are women whom nature and man have denied the right to have children and some women think that they can do some good public work apart from their domestic life; it is very essential that they should have all the opportunities they want."

Rising to the theme of social obstacles, Mrs. Vervey continued, "There may be social reasons against feminine participation as well. In most societies women seem to be marked out for special jobs, for the school and the office, rather than for the meeting-room. But we should not be too eager to draw our conclusions from facts like that."

She also rejected this obstacle by stating, "A hundred years ago, before Miss Florence Nightingale started her campaign, there was no question of training women to be nurses. Ten years ago there were many doubts, even I think in this country, about women's services. Some views about jobs fit for women are inclined to be changed rather rapidly."

"... in the third place," she continued, "some people might quote psychological reasons. They might point out that this is still a man-built world and that women feel strangers as soon as they venture into it. This is true in a way."

She made one of the first barbs in the United Nations records about the adequacy of male constructions of international order by stating "I must say that men have built this world quite impressively and that we feel duly impressed at first. After a certain time, however, some of us feel inclined to say: Is that all? All this pomp and all these intricate sentences can be translated into quite simple relations and words; and from that moment we feel quite capable of playing our part."

"What I should like to emphasize is this: there may seem to be very strong reasons why no woman of your country can participate in international work. But are you sure? Is there no woman somewhere hidden away in a corner, no teacher, no woman professor, no woman doctor, no one who would be a credit to your delegation and who would be extremely glad to have this opportunity to meet men and women in an international sphere? It is on their behalf and on behalf of the women they represent that we make this recommendation."

The delegate of the United Kingdom, Philip Noel-Baker, spoke last and made a proposal that women be recruited for the Secretariat of the United Nations and that links be made with the women’s movement.

He said: "... I have risen in order to draw the attention of the Secretary-General, very respectfully, to two practical points: first, that there ought to be representation of women in responsible posts in the Secretariat itself; and, secondly, that the services of the Information Section of the Secretariat ought to keep in close contact with the great women's organizations throughout the world. I think, in those ways, the views of Mrs. Roosevelt, and her colleagues, so eloquently expressed, could well be served."

The New Zealand delegate, Mr. Fraser, referred to the possibility of a commission of the Economic and Social Council to deal with issues related to advancement of women, which he supported. He foreshadowed the role of that commission as an effective instrument when he said:

The first debate in the General Assembly introduced the main participant on the long march: at the governmental level, the Commission on the Status of Women; from civil society, the non-governmental organizations of the women’s; and the Secretariat of the United Nations. For the entire fifty years from San Francisco to Beijing, the partnership between these three actors has been the mechanism for using the United Nations as an instrument for advancement of women.

The Commission on the Status of Women

The United Nations was established with ideals of universality and cooperation, but a structure built on a model of realpolitik. It was to be an organization of sovereign nation-states whose business would be done in assemblies, councils, commissions and committees where States could negotiate and agree. The bulk of the Charter presents the details about how this structure would work. Essentially, the great political issues involving war and peace would be dealt with by the Security Council and the General Assembly. Issues of an economic and social character would be dealt with in a co-equal, but somehow subordinate, Economic and Social Council, which would have its own intergovernmental substructure.

The initial response to women’s pressure for their issues was to suggest that there be a sub-commission to the Commission on Human Rights to deal with them. Advancement of women was seen, from the first, as a human rights question. The first skirmish on the road to Beijing was about the relationship of women’s human rights to the larger human rights regime.

To form the subsidiaries of the Economic and Social Council, what were termed "nuclear commissions" were formed to work out the terms of reference. In its fifth resolution on February 15, 1946, the Council established the Commission on Human Rights and the Submission on the Status of Women. The nuclear Commission on Human Rights consisted of nine members, only one of which, Mrs. Roosevelt, was female. The nuclear sub-commission also consisted of nine members, all of whom were female. No United States national was a member of the sub-commission.

The women’s movement in the United States did not have a particularly strong interest in the United Nations, a situation that characterized much of the first fifty years. Of course, the first meeting of the General Assembly was in London, but even after the venue was changed to Lake Success and then to Manhattan, American feminists tended to ignore the U.N.

Part of the reason was that there was a contradictory tendency within the United States both to believe that there was no need for a separate women’s issue and that women deserved special attention and protection. On the one hand, it was believed that, having achieved the vote in 1921, women’s rights were adequately protected. On the other hand, the struggles against exploitative labor practices had led to the creation, in 1921 also, of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor whose main function was to ensure protection (and hence unequal treatment) of women workers. It has been reported that Frances Perkins, the first woman to be named to a cabinet position (as Secretary of Labor) was not an advocate of equality, since that would undercut protective legislation.

These two tendencies were both expressed by Mrs. Roosevelt, who believed that women’s rights could be adequately dealt with by the Commission on Human Rights and that having a separate body would tend to marginalize women. She also believed passionately in protecting women against exploitation. As chair of the nuclear Commission on Human Rights she was less than enthusiastic about a proposal that the sub-commission on status of women should be raised to a full commission.

The nuclear sub-commission on the status of women had met in April 1946. Its members included several who had fought for inclusion of gender equality in the Charter, including particularly Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic, who had also spoken on the issue at the General Assembly. Ms. Bernardino, one of the youngest delegates at San Francisco and the first woman to be named representative to the United Nations, had been involved with the Inter American Committee on Women of the Organization of American States, whose purpose was to advocate for women’s rights.

It also included a number of European women which might be considered feminists, even today. One of them, Mrs. Bodil Begtrup of Denmark, a member of the Danish resistance during World War II, was named chair of the nuclear sub-commission and delivered its report to the Economic and Social Council. In addition to reporting on its recommendations about its terms of reference and the main components of a United Nations women’s program, Mrs. Begtrup communicated the view that status of women should be made independent of the Commission on Human Rights.

Speaking in front of the assembled Council meeting in its second session at its temporary quarters, Mrs. Begtrup began in her Danish-accented English: "We understand well why the Economic and Social Council placed this question of the status of women under the wing of the Commission of Human Rights. Plans for development towards full equality certainly is a work for essential human rights."

"But," she continued, "I am asked, by my Commission, to propose to the Economic and Social Council that this Sub-Commission should be made a full Commission."

She elaborated further, building an argument that would be used effectively over the next fifty years as a argument to explain why it was not desirable to try to build attention to women’s concerns too rapidly into the mainstream. She said, "in view of the importance of this world-wide social scheme which covers, in fact, the condition of half the population of the world, the work ought to have the best possible working conditions and not be dependent upon another Commission, and that it would give this work more weight in the social field if it was done by a full Commission."

She laid the cards firmly on the table, as she pointed out, ""It has been said also, in these days, that women's problems should not be separate from those of men. But however idealistic, this point of view is purely unrealistic and academic. The practice shows that the Economic and Social Council has special problems that are connected with the status of women."

"These problems have now for the first time in history to be studied internationally as such and to be given the social importance they ought to have." she continued. "And it would be, in the opinion of this Sub-Commission of experts in this field, a tragedy to spoil this unique opportunity by confusing the wish and the facts."

Mrs. Begtrup articulated a hope that by a combination of legal efforts, use of public policy and by mobilization, the inequalities between men and women could be reduced. She stated, "Some situations can be changed by laws, education, and public opinion, and the time seems to have come for happy changes in conditions of women all over the world."

She restated a belief that the war had broken down many of the barriers to equality. "The attitude of men toward women has changed tremendously during the war in the countries having taken part in the war, because of the comradeship in the resistance movement and in the war activities." She continued: "in having signed the Charter all the Governments of the United Nations have pledged themselves, have shown an interest in working for equality between men and women."

She then presented the view originally set out in the letter read by Mrs. Roosevelt that the United Nations should be a vehicle for mobilizing women: "this interest shown by the United Nations in the conditions of women has aroused hope and interest among women all over the world in this new world. The feeling that this big body, this United Nations, with all the social and political difficulties before it, still has time to take an interest in the daily life and in raising the status of women has aroused an enormous interest, and I can assure you that the women all over the world will give all their heart, mind and will to serve in the work of peace entrusted to the United Nations."

Mrs. Begtrup set out the issues which the Commission should address, a set of concerns that eventually found reflection in the Beijing Platform for Action:

She reported that the nuclear sub-commission had made a number of recommendations for actions to be taken to address these issues. These included that:

In the United Nations speeches are not usually followed by applause. Their effect is seen in whether they move the delegates to take action. Looking back, it is obvious that many of these proposals made by Mrs. Begtrup on behalf of her colleagues took decades to be implemented.

The Council, however, did decide to raise the status of the sub-commission to that of a full Commission on the Status of Women. There was no further public debate on the question, so the matter had to have been resolved in the informal consultations that take place whenever a UN inter-governmental body prepares the text of its decisions.

The reasons for the decision are not explicitly stated in the record. It is evident, however, that there was a sufficient concern among women delegates that they convinced their male colleagues on the Council that the politicization of the Commission on Human Rights that was evident from its very first session as well as its primarily male composition raised justifiable fears that women's rights would be lost in a turbulent mainstream. In making this judgement, the founders drew on the experience of the Inter-American Commission on Women of the Organization of American States, which had been in existence since the 1920's, and on early work of the League of Nations on women's rights. It was probably also true that many of the men preferred to have women’s issues dealt with elsewhere, primarily by women themselves, since these issues were not considered important.

A United Nations office of women’s affairs?

The idea that there should be a United Nations office of women’s affairs reflected an understanding of the potential of the United Nations Secretariat that was far ahead of government thinking and, indeed, of the thinking of the civil servants who were establishing the Secretariat.

Within the dominant realist model being applied to international organizations, the role of the permanent civil service was essentially passive. Anything else might smack of world government, a concept rejected by all but the most idealistic. The function of the Secretariat was to be the humble servant of the governments, helping to organize meetings, preparing agendas, translating documents, interpreting the discussions and publishing the reports. In this function, the role of the civil servant was to be politically neutral. It was also a low-risk job.

It was presumed that the government delegates would provide the substance for discussion. Indeed, functional commissions of the Economic and Social Council were considered to be expert bodies, whose individual members were nominated by their governments and confirmed by the Council on the basis of their personal experience and expertise.

The idea that a secretariat unit might do the research necessary for the experts to discuss and reach conclusions implied more than a passive group of civil servants. It implied a function of public leadership that few of the men organizing the Secretariat would share. More radically, the idea that such a unit could be "the planning center for the work and clearing house for information about the status of women and women's activities" and that "it would give the women all over the world a feeling of satisfaction to have a special office at the Headquarters of the United Nations" implied a pro-active role that was far from the model being established elsewhere.

When the first meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women took place in early 1947, it was noted in the report that the representative of the Secretary-General was Miss Elsie Bowerman (UK?), Acting Chief, Section on the Status of Women. The first budget of the organization made provision for a section on the status of women consisting of three professional and one general service staff member as part of the Division for Human Rights. One of the professional staff members was a man, Gunnar Bjune from Norway, recruited at the entry-level. Stability of organizational units was not a characteristic of the early days of the United Nations Secretariat and most of the original staff moved on, with the surprising exception of Gunner Bjune, who was a constant factor in the staff through 1952.

By the next session of the Commission in 1948, the representative of the Secretary-General was Mr. John P. Humphrey (Canada), Director of the Division of Human Rights. Mr. Humphrey, who was Director of the Division of Human Rights for twenty-five years. The Section on the Status of Women was headed, again on an acting basis, by Miss Leonie Mitchell of the United Kingdom. Mr. Humphrey was never comfortable with the Section and was said to have held, throughout that period, that it was not necessary to have a separate women’s secretariat and that human rights were gender-neutral. However, the political pressures to maintain a distinct and identifiable women's rights unit protected the Section over the next forty-five years. The resources given to the Section on the Status of Women were always meager. However, during 1948, the Section was given its first chief, Mrs. Amanda Labarca of Chile.

At the 1949 session of the Commission, the Secretary-General was represented by Mrs. Labarca. That 1949 session was characterized by a significant concern for the position of women in the United Nations Secretariat itself. It had before it a study showing that very few women were found in the middle- and upper-management ranks of the Secretariat.

In 1950, the Secretary-General was represented by Mrs. Alva Myrdal of Sweden who was a senior director in the Department of Social Affairs. She was the first woman appointed at the Director level in the Secretariat, as against 14 men. This was in a Secretariat where all of the nine assistant secretaries-general at the time were men, a situation that persisted until 1973. She was a distinguished economist who eventually won a Nobel peace prize for her work on disarmament. She had worked with her husband, Gunnar Myrdal on the definitive study of racism in America, An American Dilemma She did not last very long in the United Nations Secretariat. Her appearance at the Commission, however, was clearly an attempt to show that there were women in the Secretariat leadership.

Mrs. Labarca continued as Chief of the Status of Women Section. Like all of the other staff of the Section, she did not hold a permanent contract and left before the 1950 session of the Commission.

The Secretariat had prepared a number of studies, including one which documented the limited participation of women in the work of the United Nations itself. It showed that few women were part of government delegations. The report stated that "Five hundred and eighty-eight representatives, alternates and advisers from fifty-nine Member States attended the fourth regular session of the General Assembly. This number included four women representatives, ...; nine women alternate representatives, ... , eleven women advisers, experts and consultants..." This meant that only four percent of the delegates were women. The study, prepared by the women of the section supporting the Commission, also showed that some 22 percent of professional staff were women and that, in the Staff Rules of the Secretariat, women were treated differently than men. It also documented the number of Member States who did not grant women an equal right to vote and hold office. The report suggested to the Commission the possibility of drafting an international human rights convention on the political rights of women.

The Commission was not amused. It passed a resolution which noted that "women have been engaged mainly in subordinate positions in the Secretariat, and that very few women have been appointed as members of delegations", and requesting the Secretary-General to examine the reasons why women have not yet been able to take up more important positions in the Secretariat, and report thereon; in this resolution, the Commission also invited the Secretary-General "to take the necessary steps to give promotion to qualified women staff members and to appoint more women to higher posts which they are competent to fill in order to secure equality between the sexes in the Secretariat and thereby assure more fully the participation of women in all capacities in United Nations organs".

By the next year, the Secretary-General had prepared a report suggesting improvements in the number of women in high positions was due to increase, had revised the staff rules to eliminate the discriminatory provisions and had named a chief for the Section on the Status of Women. This began a period of relative stability, lasting through 1977, when only three different women headed the Section.

The first chief with tenure was Mary Tenison-Woods of Australia, who held the office from 1951-1958. She headed a section with five professionals, all lawyers, including, at various points, one man. In 1953, there were five women among the 31 professionals of the Division on Human Rights, four in the Status of Women Section. Tenison-Woods was like many of the Australian and New Zealand women who have worked in the organization: blunt, dedicated, fearless and casual. [More detail on Tenison-Woods].

She was succeeded in 1958 by Mrs. Sophie Grinberg-Vinaver of France, who had been her deputy. Grinberg-Vinaver had been in the French resistance and her family owned businesses in New York. Fiery in temperament, she was considered a passionate, if unbureaucratic, advocate of women’s rights. She quickly fell afoul of Mr. Humphrey, the Division Director, who had little use for women’s issues or, for that matter, women professionals. A story told to me by Tamar Oppenheim of Canada, who was a staff member of the section at the time and who later climbed through the ranks of the Secretariat to become Assistant Secretary-General and head of the United Nations programme to address drug abuse described Ms. Grinberg-Vinaver’s waterloo.

Prevented by a decision of the Director to attend a meeting which Ms. Grinberg-Vinaver felt important, she stormed into Humphrey’s office and demanded that he reverse his decision. "If you do not reverse your decision," she stormed, "I resign." "Resignation accepted," he replied.

The next Chief of the Status of Women Section was Mrs. Margaret Bruce, who led the section from 1963-1977. Molly Bruce was English. She had been in the British military during World War II and had been one of the first persons hired to join the new United Nations Secretariat. She had worked from the beginning in the nascent Division for Human Rights, most not in the section dealing with women. Widely considered an epitome of an international civil servant who, after her retirement in 1977 headed the Association of Former International Civil Servants and was a member of the board of directors of the United States United Nations Association, Molly Bruce gave the section a stability that allowed it to build a sound legal basis for reform.

B. Marching forward, but slowly, 1948-1968

It is possible to pass over the twenty years from 1948 to 1968. There was considerable work done and much progress, but the work of the United Nations was what a Latin American might terms un trabajo de hormigas, a work of ants, slowly and imperceptibly moving earth and building. The onset of the Cold War, including the ouster of the first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie of Norway, from office, placed the United Nations on the sidelines of global politics and affected the activities of all programs. Civil servants became for cautious, the organization went through the first of its many financial crises, the mode of decision-making moved inevitably toward consensus rather than voting.

The Commission on the Status of Women, like many intergovernmental bodies of the time, believed in decision-making by vote. At its first session, a large number of issues went to the vote. The votes divided between Western members and the few developing country governments who were members on one side, and representatives of States from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It became evident early on that any agreement based on majority vote was fatally flawed, since the dissenters, under the principle of national sovereignty, had no obligation to implement decisions which they had not voted to adopt.

To the extent that positions were polarized, it was difficult to achieve consensus and the Secretariat role of providing information and suggesting texts that would bridge differences was difficult. Progress was accordingly slow.

A few highlights stand out.

Dag Hamarskjold speaks on women

In 1954, the Secretary-General, Dag Hamarskjold, addressed the Commission on the Status of Women. It was the first, and the last time, that a United Nations Secretary-General addressed the Commission. Hamarskjold was only in the second year of his term, and the previous autumn the first women, Mrs. Pandit of India had been the first women elected president of the General Assembly (there would only be one other in history, Mrs. Angie Brooks of Liberia in the 1960’s).

The Secretary-General obviously felt a need to address the Commission, and began by congratulating the Commission on its work and stating that it could note with pride that as a result of its activities, the United Nations, under the authority of the General Assembly, had sponsored the opening of an international Convention on Political Rights of Women under which women would have the right to vote, to be elected, to hold all public offices and to discharge all public functions. Thirty-five countries had signed the Convention and instruments of ratification had been deposited by three countries, the first being the Dominican Republic.

Hamarskjold continued that he was particularly interested in the item relating to the participation of women in the work of the United Nations. Although the number of women in higher posts of the United Nations and the specialized agencies were few, that did not prove that women were subject to discrimination.

He went on to express what was a commonly held view of many men that would explain the absence of women in decision-making. He stated that women's emancipation was so recent that highly qualified women had not yet been trained in anything like the same numbers as men, who had long enjoyed all the advantages of specialized education and training.

He then suggested that women’s absence was a matter of their own choice, instead of entering public life many women who were highly qualified chose other equally important roles in the community. As a result there were few women, compared with men, in high posts in the public life of all countries and the United Nations naturally reflected that situation. It was logical to think that as the proportion of trained women in national life increased, the change would be reflected in the staffs of the international organizations.

Taking into account that the Commission had begun to consider itself the watchdog of the Secretariat in its efforts to ensure promotion of women, he assured the Commission, however, that under his administration there would be no discrimination on the ground of sex; the best person available for a post would be given the post regardless of race, sex, color or creed.

However, he also suggested that in the interests of good and effective administration questions regarding personnel should be channeled through the appropriate body, the Fifth Committee, to which the Secretary-General must report on all personnel matters and from which, therefore, all requests for information on personnel administration should normally come.

The Fifth Committee, almost completely composed of male delegates, had much less interest in statistics on women in the Secretariat and did not request the information. Indeed, it was not until 1971 that statistics on the gender breakdown of UN professional staff were made available to intergovernmental bodies. Had they been made available, what was really happening might have been noticed.

In 1949, when the Status of Women Section began providing the Commission with figures, a total of 23.4 percent of the professional staff, including 43 percent of those at the entry-level, were women. This reflected a number of factors, including the fact that during World War II many highly qualified women had entered government service at middle levels as replacements for men. Vacating their positions when the men returned, as was the custom, many joined the United Nations where they could fill similar positions. It was also the fact that many women were attracted to United Nations service by the expressed ideals of non-discrimination.

By 1955, the year after Hamarskjold decided not to provide figures, only 16.8 percent of professionals in a growing Secretariat were women and the proportion at entry-levels had dropped to 30.1 percent. The 1949 figure was not exceeded until after 1980, after two world conference on women and the imposition of affirmative action. In the end, Dag Hamarskjold like his next successors and most high level government officials found that "the best person available for a post" may have been of different races, colors or creeds, but they were almost inevitably men, especially at the higher ranks.

No big women’s human rights convention, but some little ones

The United Nations approach to human rights was supposed to have been solidified by the adoption, in 1948, of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Commission on the Status of Women had helped in drafting it by suggesting the use of non-sexist language in some key parts and the Declaration contained a prohibition on discrimination based on sex.

The politics of the period, however, meant that translating the principles of the Universal Declaration into a binding multi-lateral treaty, called a convention, took much more time than might have been hoped. Just as the women who had advocated a Commission on the Status of Women separate from the Commission for Human Rights had suspected, the Human Rights Commission soon fell into the political struggles of the Cold War and progress in negotiation of human rights treaties became glacial.

There were specific issues for women that had to be addressed, starting with women’s political rights. It was on the basis of a Secretariat report which also suggested that the most appropriate remedy was an international human rights convention. Such a convention was quickly negotiated and entered into force in 1952. It provided, in some detail, for absolute equality between women and men in political participation, including voting and holding public office.

Another issue affecting women after World War II was nationality. The waves of immigration, refugee flows, movement of people to find jobs in other countries and the movements of militaries had led to a large number of marriages between women and men of different nationalities. In the laws of many countries, women who married foreigners automatically lost their own nationalities. If they did not lose their own nationality, their children could only acquire the nationality of their father.

Many women did not wish to give up their nationality, since this deprived them not only of their cultural heritage and identity, but also the protection of their country’s laws.

The Commission, based on studies from the Secretariat, addressed the problem by drafting an international convention on the nationality of married women, which set international norms of equality. The Convention on the Nationality of Married Women was adopted by the General Assembly on January 29, 1957.

Another issue that emerged during the period was the fact that very young girls were being forced by their parents, in many countries, to marry. These practices had the effect of ensuring women’s subordinate status and reflected that, in many cultures, women were considered less valuable than men. While not expressed at the time, since research had not been done on the issue, early marriage and child-bearing was hazardous to women’s health and was a major factor in maternal mortality. In most countries, laws set the age of consent lower for girls than for boys.

Taken together, the factors related to coerced marriage, young age and, in addition, the fact that many marriages were not recorded, combined to make women’s advancement impossible in many countries. The Commission, after several years discussion, decided to draft an international convention on the question. As a result of its work, the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages was adopted by the General Assembly on November 7, 1962.

The work on women’s rights continued steadily. In 1963, the Council asked the Commission to begin work on a draft declaration on the elimination of discrimination against women. A declaration is the weakest form of human rights instrument. Unlike a convention, which is legally binding to any state that accedes to it, a declaration is an expression of principles with moral but not legal force. However, declarations are often a way to reach agreement on language that can later be used to draft instruments.

The idea of working on a draft declaration on discrimination arose from a concern that the smaller conventions did not cover the whole range of problems women faced and, also, a concern that the larger human rights instruments being fashioned out of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights might be long in coming.

In December 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights were both adopted by the General Assembly. These gave legal force to the Universal Declaration and their common article 3 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex.

In 1967, the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

My mother's experience

I was born in 1942 and what was happening in the first thirty years of the United Nations to women was not something I experienced directly. But my mother experienced all of it, to the extent that a woman in the midwest of the United States was affected by the trends. Much of it she told me, much I learned after the fact.

When my mother was born in 1916, women did not have the right to vote. Few attended college. My mother, from a middle class family in a small town in southern Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota, the first woman in the family to do so. She considered becoming a girls physical education teacher but settled on becoming a social worker, two of the few careers open to women university graduates. She began her career as a child welfare worker in a small town. At one point she decided to move to Los Angeles, California as a way out of small town culture, but in the end she stayed in Minnesota where she married my father, a linotype operator. I was born shortly thereafter and my mother would have been expected to stop working, but the United States entered World War II, my father was drafted into the army and my mother had to balance work and family responsibilities by continuing to work.

When the war ended, my mother was expected to give up her job to a returning veteran, and become a housewife. She did so, bearing two more children. When my sister grew to school age, my mother, in the face of both economic necessity and the need for independence, returned to work. Having left the labor force for ten years, she was re-hired at the lowest rung of the professional ladder. She was one of the few women in the town to work, other than the women in family businesses or on farms who worked without remuneration, and other than poor women who always worked as housekeepers and dependent carers. Later, it became necessary for most women to work, as America’s economy went into prolonged recession.

At one point, the post of director of the county welfare department became open and she applied. The decision was up to the county board, composed entirely of men, as were all of the county officers. They selected a man with less experience or training. My mother was told that he needed the job and, in any case, her husband was working. When the man was eventually fired for incompetence, my mother ran the office for awhile until the county board appointed another man.

When she turned fifty, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was a type that predominantly affects women, although that wasn’t known at the time. She didn’t know that little medical research was being done on diseases that primarily affected women. When she died, it didn’t occur to my brother, my sister and I that there had been something fundamentally wrong with the way my mother had had to live her life.

Technical assistance: an opening to development

The understanding that the situation of women was different in various parts of the world had been reflected in the "Letter to the Woman on the World." What to do about this had been less clear. In other parts of the United Nations, the problems of what were first termed "backward", later "underdeveloped" and finally "developing" countries began to be addressed by way of technical assistance programs.

The first United Nations technical assistance program was approved in 1947 as a section in the regular budget of the organization. The premise was that an infusion of know-how from the developed countries would enable developing countries to advance. The program gradually advanced, with the formation of a voluntarily-funded Expanded program of technical assistance. In addition UNICEF undertook activities to deal with the problems of women as mothers.

It was not until 1962, however, that a special effort was made to direct technical assistance to women. In a resolution passed that year, the Economic and Social Council recommended to Governments of States Members of the United Nations and members of the specialized agencies that they make full use, for the purpose of promoting and advancing the status of women in developing countries, of the technical assistance services available, by requesting the advisory services of experts, by promoting the attendance at seminars and other meetings, and by taking advantage of the availability of fellowships and scholarships. It invited the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund, in cooperation with the United Nations, to strengthen and to expand their programs designed to meet the needs of women in developing countries, and to seek new methods to achieve this purpose.

The Council requested the Secretary-General direct his attention, when planning the various United Nations programmes of assistance, to the needs of women in developing countries and to include in these programs projects especially directed to meet such needs. Although not stated in those terms, this was an early expression of a concept of mainstreaming, where gender concerns would be built into all development cooperation.

The Council also called for women-specific development assistance programs. The Secretary-General was asked to continue to utilize the available resources of the United Nations to advance the condition of women in the developing countries, by holding seminars dealing with the status of women, by providing experts on women's rights at the request of Governments and by offering human rights fellowships and scholarships to persons concerned with the status of women, and to make available to Governments, specialized agencies and non-governmental organizations in consultative status all information concerning the facilities available for the advancement of women.

In a sense, the Council was prompted by the Commission on the Status of Women to give a greater outreach responsibility to the Secretariat. It reflected a frustration with the process whereby most work on advancement of women would take place in intergovernmental forums. It also accompanied an increasing concern of the United Nations with issues of development, reflected in the designation of the First United Nations Decade for Development.

For the women’s program, its immediate precursor was a series of Secretariat studies followed by recommendations by the Commission in 1952 concerning the deprivation of the essential human rights of women in Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories. The resolution adopted invited "all States, including States which have or assume responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing Territories, to take immediately all necessary measures with a view to abolishing progressively in the countries and territories under their administration all customs which violate the physical integrity of women, and which thereby violate the dignity and worth of the human person as proclaimed in the Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." This was an early appearance of an issue that was to resolved only after the Nairobi Conference, female circumcision or what was termed gently "traditional practices that are harmful to the health of women."

The Council, in mandating a program of technical assistance, also emphasized the role of the women’s movement. It urged "women's non-governmental organizations in consultative status to cooperate with the Secretary-General, by stimulating public opinion with regard to the programmes of the United Nations which contribute to the advancement of women and by supplementing the efforts of the United Nations on the international and national levels through the holding of regional, national or local seminars, including if possible in the future an international seminar, the provision of fellowships, scholarships and expert advice, and other related activities."

Women and the Venezuelan Agrarian Reform

I became part of the mainstream United Nations technical assistance effort in 1966 when I was appointed to the position of expert in evaluation of social aspects of agrarian reform (community development). The post had been requested by the government of Venezuela, which was undertaking a massive empirical evaluation of the impact and workings of its agrarian reform, which was one of the most extensive efforts in Latin America. The lead organization for technical assistance was the Inter American Development Bank. I was the UN’s input. My job was to design and analyze the social component of a major sample survey of beneficiaries of the agrarian reform, as well as to direct several case studies of agrarian reform settlements.

I was part of a team consisting of economists, agronomists, statisticians as well as a few sociologists, both national and international. There were no women professionals on the team.

Gender did not seem to be a factor in the agrarian reform. While the Venezuelan agrarian reform law did not exclude land ownership by women, its application tended to give land exclusively to men. On the government side, the agricultural extension agents were all men, since women were only trained in home economics extension. The leaders of the peasant unions, who represented peasant interests, were almost inevitably men.

In several of the case studies I noticed that in a context in which most government change agents were rather ineffective, the most effective government officials dealing with the reform were women: local primary school teachers, mostly of peasant origin, and promoters of the community development program. The community development program in Venezuela had been founded by a woman, Dr. Carola Ravel, and much of its staff was female. I did not report this in my findings, since my colleagues and I did not think that it was significant.

In the sample survey, which involved interviews with some 5,000 peasant households, we attempted to obtain very accurate information about the peasant household economy. We did so by asking peasants in interviews that lasted on average two and one-half hours to reconstruct, operation by operation, the entire previous agricultural years. "How many hectares did you sow?" the interviewer would ask. "How many kilos of seed did you use?" "How much did the seed cost?" "How many days did you spend sowing the seed?" "How many days did your wife spend helping you?"

The method allowed the study, among other things, to estimate the value of labor input, both in terms of cash and kind. Although it did not occur to us that this was what we were doing, it allowed us to put a value on women’s and men’s unremunerated work. We did this by counting the number of days that a family member would contribute to various agricultural operations and then assigning it a monetary value based on the prevailing wage rate for hired agricultural labor in the zone. The crops produced for home consumption were given a value based on the cost of purchasing the same products in a local store.

When I reviewed the results, like a good sociologist, I ran sex against many of the indicators and discovered, as others had in micro-studies, that there was a sexual division of labor in agriculture: women were predominant in certain operations like weeding and harvesting, men in others. Women were predominant in raising food for home consumption. When a value was assigned to that labor and production for home consumption, it was evident that the economic contribution of the women in the household was generally larger than that of the men.

While the figures stood out, and I noted them mentally, when I completed my contract at the end of 1967, I did not include those findings in my report, nor did the report of the evaluation note them. The findings were not considered significant.

C. On to Mexico City, 1968-1975

Looking back, 1968 was a watershed hear in many ways. It was the year of the "youthquake" where students and young workers toppled the government of France and protested the Vietnam war in Chicago. It was also the year that the United Nations women’s program changed direction.

The specific event that year was the largely forgotten International Conference on Human Rights organized in Teheran by the United Nations. The conference was called at least in part to break the political logjam that had afflicted the mainstream human rights regime. It also involved the Commission on the Status of Women and its secretariat, who were still considered part of human rights. It put on the table a number of issues that were to recur through the period to Beijing.

While women’s human rights could not be said to have been a major feature of the debates in the Teheran conference, one of the resolutions adopted by the conference directly addressed the approach to be taken. Resolution was entitled "measures to promote women's rights in the modern world and endorsing the Secretary-General's proposal for a unified long-term United Nations programme for the advancement of women". The resolution reflected a shift that had occurred in considering how to deal with advancement of women.

While it maintained its human rights base, its focus was heavily on issues related to economic and social development, especially on education. It accepted a proposal by the Secretariat that, rather than dealing episodically with issues, there was a need for a long-term work program. The idea of a unified long-term program had been broached in 1962, in the context of development assistance. It was recognized that the various United Nations programs providing development assistance were not coordinating their efforts to advance women and it was felt that placing them within a programmatic context would obtain "more bang for a buck". Longer-term approaches and coordination were two off-the-shelf answers to the question of how to deal with complex problems in a complex organizational environment.

The shift also reflected a resurgence of feminism, in both the North and the South. American feminism had been energized by the writings of such thinkers as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, which had touched a cord among younger women. In the developing countries, younger women who were emerging from post-colonial education system were beginning to question their situation. The two threads, western feminism and the perspectives of women from developing countries, were to come together with increasing frequency over the next quarter century.

Learning about the Feminine Mystique

In 1964 I was a graduate student in Boston. Like most of my colleagues, I was studying development. We had been called by John Kennedy to service and we were preparing ourselves. It being a faculty of political science, we were convinced of the utility of the State and of the political process to bring about change. While the majority of students were men, as were all of the professors, there was a high proportion of women among the students and staff. Many came from the elite women’s colleges of the East.

I recall walking home from school that autumn with one of the support staff of the department, who had graduated from Wellesley College. She was reading a book entitled The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I was struck by her enthusiasm (and this may be why I remember the incident). She said that it gave her an entirely new perspective on herself. She offered to lend it to me.

I politely declined and our conversation moved on to other matters.

The long-term work program essentially consisted of a set of broad objectives, a number of tasks for the Commission and, by implication, directions for the work of the Secretariat. In a period when most Secretariat units had year-to-year workplans, this was a major innovation.

The objectives set included promotion of the equal rights of men and women, enabling women to participate fully in the development of society and stimulating an awareness among both men and women of women's full potential and of the importance of their contribution to the development of society. Among other measures suggested were three priorities for the Commission on the Status of Women. These included to:

The focus on education was a long-term one for the Commission. It had been on the earliest agendas, but had gradually dropped off. Its return reflected a renewed interest in public policy measures. The suggestion on additional conventions was never followed-up, but the underlying point of drafting conventions to deal with discrimination not dealt with by other conventions led to the drafting of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. It was the result of work which had suggested that the other human rights conventions were dealing primarily with acts committed by States, rather than the acts which were committed by other members of society.

The idea that the Commission should restructure its work program is one that has recurred at least three times since. It was based on the premise that women would be able to use the Commission as a means to articulate views at the international level that their national structures made difficult to express in their own countries. As part of government delegations, as one of the many non-governmental organizations that congregated around Commission sessions, the inter-governmental machinery for advancement of women was different from most of the bodies that had been formed at the outset of the United Nations. During the Cold War, most of these had slipped into routines based on seeming, rather than real progress.

The Secretariat was also preparing for a change. In 1969, the Division for Human Rights was transferred to Geneva. While the rationale provided was to help insulate the human rights program from politics by removing it from the political arena of New York to a calmer Switzerland, the reality was that the United Nations had run out of space for expansion in New York and an effort was made to move less important units there to fill up available space in the Palais des Nations.

The Status of Women Section was not moved; it remained in New York. There were a number of reasons for this, but the reality was that there was sufficient pressure from non-governmental organizations who argued that moving the Section would have fatally damaged the women’s program by cutting it off from its base. It was also true that the work program of the Commission was now far different from that of the Commission for Human Rights and the Status of Women Section was less easy to integrate into the Division for Human Rights than ever.

As a result, the women’s program was spared the dislocation that usually accompanies the move of a United Nations unit from one duty station to another, where a high percentage of staff find ways to avoid transfer, new staff are brought on board in the new location, and the support base is completely changed. The dislocation was to come later when, in 1979, the Secretariat unit was moved to Vienna and again in 1993 when it was moved back to New York.

Three issues began to dominate the discourse as the decade of the 1970’s approached: a renewed concern with advancement of women in the organizations of the United Nations system, a commitment to draft a comprehensive convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, and, finally a decision to use the vehicle of special events to promote progress.

Reviving the issue of women in the United Nations

After Dag Hamarskjold had told the Commission that the Secretariat would no longer provide it with data on the proportion of women in the international civil service, the issue of participation of women in the United Nations had gradually receded from the agenda. The renewed interest in the operative functions of the organization, as well as in matters of democratic participation, led many women’s organizations, as well as women within the United Nations to ask why there weren’t more of them.

By 1970, the proportion of women among professionals in the Secretariat had reached 20 percent, lower than in 1949, but higher than in previous decades. The proportion of women in senior management (director level and above) was, at five percent, at its highest level in history. But no one knew this, since staff statistics were not reported broken down by sex.

The Third Committee of the General Assembly, where there was an annual item on advancement of women had become an alternative to the Commission to represent women’s concerns. Meeting in the autumn, compared with the late-winter, early-spring meetings of the Commission, the week-long debate in the Assembly became a vehicle for women to use the higher-level hierarchy of the Assembly to push issues. While the Commission could not request information about staffing, the Assembly could and in 1970, it adopted a resolution which requested the Secretary-General to include in his report to the General Assembly on the composition of the Secretariat data on the employment of women at senior and other professional level, including their numbers and the positions they occupied.

While not the first time, this was part of an emerging process where issues would be raised in the Assembly, handed to the Commission, dealt with in the Commission and handed to the Assembly. It was a process that was gradually refined in the ten years before Beijing, but had begun fifteen years earlier.

Women and the second development decade

The focus of United Nations work, in the light of political stalemates caused by the Cold War and because of the influx of newly-independent countries, had shifted increasingly to development issues. Starting with the proclamation of the first United Nations Development Decade in 1962, growth in the organization had become centered on units concerned with economic and social development issues. The first development decade had not had a plan or program of action, just a statement of objectives in a General Assembly resolution.

The Assembly had decided to prepare a detailed plan for the second decade, that would run from 1971 to 1980. The premise was that, by placing development issues in a plan framework and negotiating them, a framework would be set in place for development cooperation. In practice, the process of drafting the strategies, which took place within the Second Committee of the General Assembly, was a means to confront the increasingly serious differences in approach between developed and developing countries and paper them over.

There was no gender dimension in the first development strategy and, given the almost total absence of women from government delegations working in the Second Committee or in the Secretariat units servicing it, little likelihood that women would be included in the strategy for the Second Development Decade. And the Strategies adopted in 1970 were not women-friendly.

Faced with the situation, using the device of the women’s item in the Third Committee, women’s advocates in governments, in non-governmental organizations and in the Secretariat succeeded in passing a resolution which, under the guise of "a programme of concerted international action for the advancement of women", presented an addendum to the Strategies that stated women’s case for inclusion in development and set its own targets. These minimum targets were grouped in four areas: Education, emphasizing elimination of illiteracy and equal access to education for girls; training and employment, emphasizing non-discrimination and increased opportunities; health and maternity protection, emphasizing availability of maternal and child health services; and administration and public life, emphasizing increases in women in decision-making.

In the text of the resolution was the beginning of the agreed text that allowed development of the idea of women’s reproductive and sexual rights. Under the heading of health and maternity protection, the resolution set a minimum target of "Making available to all persons who so desire the necessary information and advice to enable them to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to prepare them for responsible parenthood, including information on the ways in which women can benefit from family planning." The issue of family planning and reproductive rights would be among the most contentious over the next quarter century, but the basis for compromise was laid down in 1970. Expressed at this point as a normative statement that information should be available, it began the long process of defining that women and men have the right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children.

A step towards a United Nations office for women

When the requested information on women in the organizations of the United Nations system was finally presented to the 26th session of the General Assembly in 1971, the results were shocking to many delegations, and confirmed the suspicion of many that the organization was not women-friendly. At the time, advancement of women was taken up for action only every other year, and it was necessary to await until the 27th session to act formally. However, in speeches and in the corridors, women delegates and non-governmental organizations began to pressure their governments and the Secretariat on the issue.

The situation that had shocked delegates was expressed in preambular paragraphs of a resolution adopted by the Assembly in 1972. It noted that:

The resolution referred to the grades in the international civil service. These ran from the entry-level P-1 and P-2 grades, through the journeyman grades of P-3 and P-4, to middle management, at the P-5 and D-1 level. The D-1 or Principal Officer grade was the highest rank one could achieve on the basis of career. Senior management, at the D-2 or Director level or as Assistant Secretary-General or Under-Secretary-General are political ranks. The virtual absence of women in senior management meant clearly that their concerns would not be expressed.

Of considerable concern was the fact that the United Nations Secretariat, whose record in appointing women to senior ranks was clearly abysmal, was far better than the Specialized Agencies or the funds and programs of the United Nations.

The resolution’s first operative paragraph, however, "Notes with satisfaction the recent appointment by the Secretary-General of a woman to the rank of Assistant Secretary-General and hopes that more women will be appointed to positions at high levels of the United Nations Secretariat."

That woman was Mrs. Helvi Sipila of Finland. Mrs. Sipila had been a member of the Finnish delegation to the Commission on the Status of Women for many years. She was not a government official. A lawyer by profession, Mrs. Sipila came from the NGO community. She had been head of the Girl Scouts in Finland. Having been a member of her government’s delegations for many years, she had been named chairman of the Third Committee at its 1971 session.

1971 had seen the election of Kurt Waldheim of Austria as the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations. It had been a contested election, with a Finn as his main competitor. Under pressure to name a woman to the executive level, he had begun to identify possible names. One of them was Mrs. Sipila. On a trip to Europe, he arranged to interview her. In the course of the interview he went through a process of ascertaining interest and availability, asking Mrs. Sipila whether she might be interested in and available for an appointment. Normally, this is a point prior to making an offer, since the interest and availability of a number of candidates would have been ascertained. Upon leaving the interview, Mrs. Sipila called a news conference and announced that she had been offered the appointment. Under the circumstances, Waldheim had no choice but to confirm the offer.

Mrs. Sipila’s style through the ten years that she served as Assistant Secretary-General for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs was characterized by this direct style. Not having come from a government bureaucracy, Mrs. Sipila, a small woman with a high forehead and white hair, was never daunted by arguments about why something could not be done. Her response was always, "we can find a way." Later, in the preparations for International Women’s Year, she was highly successful in raising extra-budgetary funds for the year, the savings from which became the basis for the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Her management style was also "un-UN". She would bring her staff together and, occasionally, ask them to join in singing, as befitted someone who had led her country’s girl scouts. Many of the staff, particularly the men, were considerably discomfited by the experience, which was rather standard at women’s non-governmental gatherings.

The appointment of Mrs. Sipila had the unanticipated consequence of separating the Status of Women Section permanently from the Division for Human Rights. Mrs. Sipila had been appointed with a primary interest in advancement of women. However, the Secretariat unit concerned had only nine staff members, far too small to be headed by an Assistant Secretary-General. The Secretary-General’s office then began to look for other units that could be put together to make up Mrs. Sipila’s portfolio.

Since Mrs. Sipila had been chair of the Third Committee, whose formal title was social development and humanitarian affairs, a logical approach would be to give her charge of the social aspects of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. There were some precedents. In the early years of the organization there had been a department of social affairs. However, in 1954, the departments of economic affairs and social affairs had been merged and over the years each had hived off different units. Human rights, for example, had originally been part of the department of social affairs, but as it had become more political, had been shifted to one of the political affairs departments. Housing, which had been part of the social affairs portfolio had become independent sometime in the 1960’s, trade and industrial development units had been separated from the economic affairs units.

The bureaucratic solution to giving Mrs. Sipila a portfolio was to graft the Status of Women Section onto part of the Social Development Division. In the process, the social survey and planning functions of the Social Development Division were transferred to be merged with the economic planning functions in another division. The resulting new entity was called the Centre for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs. The humanitarian part was presumably the unit concerned with advancement of women, which was upgraded to a branch and renamed the Branch for the Promotion of Equality between Men and Women. Fusing social development with advancement of women had the further consequence of forcing an interaction between a human rights unit most of whose staff were lawyers with a unit whose main professional background was social science.

Social development and status of women co-existed in an uneasy organizational relationship under a common head for the next twenty-one years, until yet another reorganized in 1993 placed both as part of a larger department concerned with sustainable development.

Joining a gender balanced Secretariat

I joined the United Nations Secretariat in September 1971 as a staff member of the Regional and Community Development Section of the Social Development Division. After my two years in Venezuela, I had completed my doctorate and gone to teach international communications at the University of Washington. After three years, I had grown restless and contacted the United Nations again about possibly re-joining.

The Division was the remnant of what had originally been the Department of Social Affairs in the early days of the organization. The Division had five sections: Social Welfare, Social Planning, Social Survey, Social Defense (crime prevention and criminal justice) and Regional and Community Development.

What was remarkable for its time, was that the Division had achieved close to gender balance in its professional staffing, including at the management level. Two of the five section chiefs were women, as were some forty percent of the staff. For much of its history, the director had been a woman. Until 1966, it had been headed by Julia Henderson, an American who, after retirement from the UN headed the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It was headed from 1966-1968 by Inga Thorsson of Sweden, who later was famous in the area of disarmament. At the time I joined it was headed by Kurt Jansson of Finland. The Social Planning Section was headed by Gloria Scott of Jamaica who later started a women’s program at the World Bank and the Social Welfare Section was headed by Aida Gindy, who later became a regional office head for UNICEF as one of its first women directors.

For women professionals, the Division was one of the few places in the United Nations where entry was not difficult. Its professional staff was recruited from the social sciences, where there were relatively more women and it had women in management positions. As a result, the Division recruited a large number of women who eventually rose to middle and senior management positions in the organization.

With such a gender balance, it was not possible to learn the kinds of beliefts that led to discrimination against women in other United Nations units at the time. These included such beliefs as women were unreiable because they would become pregnant, that they were less mobile than men or that they were not able to work as hard. The women working in the Division were equal to the men in every way. Moreover, such a large number of women made it difficult to have sexist jokes in meetings or corridors or other forms of what we now know as aspects of sexual harassment. But it was also true that in its work, the Division paid little attention to gender differences. Like most units in the United Nations, there was an implicit assumption that development was gender-neutral.

International Women’s Year

In 1972, the General Assembly decided to designate 1975 as International Women’s Year. The United Nations had a tradition of designating years for specific purposes as a way of focusing attention on issues and providing a basis for mobilizing public support. There had been, for example, an International Geophysical Year. The women in the Third Committee of the General Assembly had seen Women’s Year in the context of the Second United Nations Development Decade, where women’s concerns had been noticeably absent in the agreed text.

As it happened, 1972 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Commission on the Status of Women and, as the resolution adopted by the Assembly stated "this is a period which makes it possible to take stock of the positive results obtained". Appraisal of progress was a stating point, but the resolution set out three themes for the year that continued to structure the debate at the intergovernmental level for the next twenty years from International Women’s Year to Beijing.

The first was to promote equality between men and women. This was the original purpose of the women’s program and was particularly supported by the developed countries of the West, including the United States.

The second was "to ensure the full integration of women in the total development effort, especially by emphasizing women's responsibility and important role in economic, social and cultural development at the national, regional and international levels, particularly during the Second United Nations Development Decade." This was the issue that had emerged during the Sixties and was strongly supported by developing countries.

The third was "to recognize the importance of women's increasing contribution to the development of friendly relations and cooperation among States and to the strengthening of world peace." This objective was strongly supported by the Soviet Union and the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

Only the objective of equality was uncontroversial. The objective of development was linked to the emerging debates about whether development was mainly a matter of national policy or of the international economic environment. The locus of responsibility for development was a major issue in the mainstream, dividing the developed from the developing countries. This injected United Nations North-South politics into the women’s arena. The objective of peace was considered by Western countries as purely political and unrelated to women’s concerns and provided a link with a wide variety of controversial issues, such as Palestine and apartheid for which there was no consensus. In fact, both issues had a gender dimension, but in their discussion, the focus had tended to be less on that than on the wider political issue.

The elaboration of a detailed plan for celebrating the year was handed over to the Commission on the Status of Women, which was meeting on a biennial schedule and would next meet in 1974. There was no precedent for how to celebrate an international year for a part of the population, so the creation of that plan would require considerable creativity.

The Commission met in the spring of 1974 and determined that the best way to organize the year would be toc all an international conference. This would be, in the words of the draft resolution it sent forward for adoption by the Economic and Social Council,

Calling international conferences had been a standard method of the United Nations since the beginning. They had mostly been in the political field, but had also become standard in the economic field. Since 1972, there had been a series of conferences on trade and development. For many years there had been quinquennial conferences on crime prevention. There had been the human rights conference in Teheran. However, the major impulses for a women’s conference were the first United Nations conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972 and the first United Nations conference on population held in Bucharest in 1974. Both of these conferences had led to the adoption of action plans or programs and had mobilized considerable effort by non-governmental organizations. Among advocates of specific issues, it had been found that the visibility given by a conference far outweighed what was often an unwieldy process.

While there was clearly no women’s dimension to the Stockholm conference on environment, since this was considered to be a completely gender-neutral issue if any consideration was given at all to gender, as one of her first major initiatives, Mrs. Sipila had promoted a series of regional seminars on women and population as part of the preparations for the Bucharest Conference. While it might be considered bizarre today, population issues in the 1970’s were not considered from a gender perspective. This was because demographers were the intellectuals behind the issue and population was considered a technical subject. It was considered by the Second (Economic) Committee of the General Assembly. And not surprisingly, both the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the Population Division of the Secretariat were headed by men, who made up most of United Nations senior management in this period.

Mrs. Sipila raised funds for a women’s approach, which succeeded in promoting some reflection on gender issues. The main issue at Bucharest, of course, was family planning and population control. Conservative forces, led by the Holy See, sought to limit language on family planning and on abortion. Many developing countries saw any emphasis on population control as a means of stifling growth in developing countries (a position also taken about environmental protection.)

A difficulty in planning for the International Conference on International Women’s Year was that it had been called on very short notice. The Commission on the Status of Women was not scheduled to meet again until 1976. The budget of the United Nations for the biennium 1974-1975 had already been approved and contained no provision for the preparations of the Conference. This last meant that the substantive preparations would have to be made by the existing staff of the Branch for the Promotion of Equality Between Men and Women.

To fill some of the gaps, the Assembly passed a separate resolution establishing a Consultative Committee for the Conference of the International Women's Year that would meet for two weeks in March 1975 to advise the Secretary-General on the preparation of an international plan of action to be finalized by the Conference. In the absence of regular budget funds for the meeting of the committee, it decided to finance the meeting from extra-budgetary funds drawn from a fund for voluntary contributions for the International Women's Year that had been established in May of 1974. Finally, the Assembly asked the Secretary-General to prepare a draft international plan of action in time to be considered by the Consultative Committee.

These three elements: a preparatory committee to agree on plans of action, a voluntary fund, and a Secretariat draft of the plan, became standard procedures for the successive women’s conferences, as each built on the experience of its predecessor.

Time was extremely short from the adoption of the resolution in draft by the Third Committee in late October 1974 until the Consultative Committee was to meet in March 1975. Since the United Nations is expected to work in six languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and absolutely must work in three of them (English, French and Spanish), and since documents are supposed to be issued six weeks prior to a meeting to allow review at national capitals, the real deadline for completion of documentation for a meeting in March is early January. The Secretariat was given a significant challenge to prepare a document that could be used as a basis for negotiation.

Although the original idea was to have the Conference at United Nations Headquarters, an invitation was made by the Government of Mexico to hold the conference in Mexico City. There are always many motives for inviting a UN conference. For women’s conferences it is often seen by women in the host country as a means of advancing the women’s cause there. That was clearly a motive in Mexico where a combination of women in political positions and younger women in the Mexican foreign ministry advocated for the invitation.

What was finally called the World Conference of the International Women's Year was held in Mexico City for two weeks from 19 June to 2 July 1975. It took place in the conference facilities of the Mexican foreign ministry itself. Some governments, non-governmental organizations and press attended.

The Conference adopted the World Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Women's Year and the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace. In it was a recommendation that the General Assembly designate the period 1975-1985 as United Nations Decade for Women.

The plan of action was intended to cover the decade. Looked at with hindsight, it is a remarkable document, foreshadowing in its 219 paragraphs most of the issues that were to be addressed in greater detail in Beijing. The plan was substantively structured in terms of nine categories of issues. Many were precursors to issues that would be dealt with in Beijing. They included (with the corresponding Beijing category in parentheses):

A number of agreements reached set the stage for further development.

First, the Plan of Action requested that "High priority should be given to the preparation and adoption of the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, with effective procedures for its implementation." At its 1974 session, the Commission on the Status of Women had decided to begin work on a convention that would implement the provisions of the 1967 Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The Conference agreement placed this all-important task on a fast track.

The Plan of Action carried the concept of reproductive rights one step further by declaring that "Individuals and couples have the right freely and responsibly to determine the number and spacing of their children and to have the information and the means to do so. The exercise of this right is basic to the attainment of any real equality between the sexes and without its achievement women are disadvantaged in their attempt to benefit from other reforms." In a later paragraph in the section on health, it referred to "the right of women to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information and means to enable them to exercise that right has a decisive impact on their ability to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities and to participate fully in community life as responsible citizens."

While it did not specify any optimal level or range, the Plan called on Governments to "establish goals, strategies and timetables for increasing within the decade 1975-1985 the number of women in elective and appointive public offices and public functions at all levels."

The Plan of Action made wide-ranging recommendations about the need to obtain better statistical information about women and expanded the scope of issues about which these should be obtained. The recommendations were far ahead of the thinking of mainstream statisticians, especially in their emphasis on economic indicators like food production, on the use of time-use data and on measuring unremunerated work. The Plan stated that:

But the Plan of Action had missed a number of issues that were later to become crucial, reflecting the state of play at the time. In 1974, advancement of women was still considered a marginal issue in the mainstream of the United Nations. There was no mention of violence against women in the text, other than in connection with trafficking for prostitution. There was no mention of the environment. Unlike other conferences, where an outcome had been creation of new institutions or increasing the resources to existing ones. The Stockholm Conference had led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The Bucharest Conference had led to the strengthening of the Population Division and an increase in the autonomy and importance of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). Mexico City did not deal with institutional questions.

More importantly, while the Plan of Action was agreed by consensus, the accompanying Declaration was adopted on the basis of a vote. There were many reasons. A major one was that in the Mexico City Declaration was found the statement "... women of the entire world, whatever differences exist between them, share the painful experience of receiving or having received unequal treatment, and that as their awareness of this phenomenon increases they will become natural allies in the struggle against any form of oppression, such as is practised under colonialism, en-colonialism, zionism, racial discrimination and apartheid, thereby constituting an enormous revolutionary potential for economic and social change in the world today."

The reference was to a text that had been voted the previous year in the General Assembly that affirmed that zionism, the campaign to obtain for Jewish people their own State, was a form of racism. A number of countries, including particular, the United States had voted against the resolution.

At the intergovernmental level, as would be shown over and over again, words or how ideas are expressed have a special importance. Governments who accept language implicitly agree to abide by it. This is the origin of most of the late night negotiations in intergovernmental bodies. Once a text is agreed, those who favor it must ensure that it is always included where relevant, since failure to do so would be a signal of a change in priority. For those who oppose a text, leaving it in a document uncontested implies acceptance of the concept.

There was other language that was problematic. In one paragraph, referring to development, the Plan of Action stated that "The developing countries, which account for 70 per cent of the population of the world, receive only 30 per cent of world income. It has proved impossible to achieve uniform and balanced development of the international community under the present economic order, and, for this reason, it is urgent to implement a new international economic order in accordance with General Assembly resolution 3201 (S-VI of 1 May 1974)."

A special session of the General Assembly had been held the year previous, in essence to revise the International Development Strategy for the Second United Nations Development Decade. In contrast to the Strategy, which involved a delicate balance between the developed country views that development was a responsibility mostly of the developing countries and the main vehicle was national reforms and the view of the developing countries that development implied transfers of resources and adjusting the international economic environment, the Sixth Special Session came down strongly in favor of development as requiring a fundamental restructuring of international economic relations in favor of the "have nots". The result was called a New International Economic Order, and it was opposed by the United States and a number of other developed countries.

The United States, confronted with the language on zionism and on the new international economic order, felt that it had no choice but to oppose the Declaration because of the language and voted against. The vote was 89 in favor, three opposed and 18 abstentions. The Plan of Action was adopted with the proviso that all statements made about it, which included reservations, were to be appended.

A United Nations document is valid for those who voted in its favor, but, while formally a loser in an election could be said to be morally bound by the outcome, in fact under a system of sovereign equality of nations, they are not legally bound to its provisions. That is why most United Nations resolutions, declarations and plans of action are adopted by consensus. The fact that the final documents of the Mexico City conference were not adopted by consensus reflected a failure in the process. It was a failure faced by most United Nations conferences over the period.

Further, when a document is adopted by consensus, countries can enter reservations to specific portions. This means that, while they may accept the general thrust of the document, they will not be bound by some language. It has the effect of giving a partial negative vote. If there are too many reservations, a document agreed by consensus can become meaningless.

For women delegates from developing countries, equality could not be achieved without development and development required an adjustment of the international economic environment. The delegates also saw a link between political oppression of a wider sort and suppression of women.

For women delegates from developed countries, especially the United States, the introduction of what they considered to be extraneous political issues into a debate about women was an intrusion. Moreover, they were bound by their country’s policies of consistency in international forums.

The position of women critics was reinforced, however, when the political issues came to the fore. At that point, the women delegates who had been negotiating on behalf of their governments would suddenly be replaced in their seats by mostly male members of delegations to the General Assembly who had been involved in the wider negotiations. This was a problem that would continue up to Beijing.

Mexico City set the bases for much progress; it also brought into the open some problems that would frustrate the march to Beijing for much of the next twenty years.

D. Mexico City to